Ordered me a backup drive for the new iMac yesterday. 500 GBs for a hundred bucks seemed reasonable enough that I couldn't resist. And the claim is it's as quiet as any external drive so that should be good. There's enough ambient noise in the office as is. We'll see if Time Machine and my own stubborn "copy that bitch" nature can fill it up over the next few weeks for me.

Archiving shit is where it's at anyway. Having a separate drive to archive to before I get around to burning a CD or DVD of it? May not be any safer in the long-run, but makes my safety button tingle.

Hopefully Time Machine doesn't run half-a-dozen times while I'm in the midst of recording shiznitz.

BREAK

I'm a weird one. I know that. Other people who dig the type of music I dig are looking for ways to sound smooth and fat and thick and whatever. While I like a certain amount of that, I also like hairy, ripping sounds. The sound of an amp right on the brink of destruction. The sound of a speaker about to tear itself apart from being pumped too full of watts. That, to me, is the sound of metal.

It's a tough balancing act to find that sound in a way that doesn't annoy the neighbors. For years and years I just didn't bother because the balance could not be found. It's either too loud for somebody else, or not loud enough to get a sound I enjoyed enough to RTFO with.

So, when I get back into about a year or so ago, I get a POD because I hear tell they're capable of great things. I fought that little bastard day and night trying to find it. I know it's in there somewhere. I've heard other people get close to what I want with it. It has to be there. Someplace.

And then, finally, I found it. It's got that big fat undertone and that huge, face-ripping mid-section and that clanky chink you expect from a speaker that's just being pushed too damn hard without being ice-pick to the ear spikey.

And when I get a few moments to record and mix-down something new, I'll let you bastards hear it. Hopefully over the next couple days, though being the early week, not likely until closer to the weekend.

I hate early weeks.

BREAK

I also hate snow. It always comes during the work week. Usually during my earl work weeks. Usually at such a time I can't get it when I get home at night but have to get it before I go to work in the morning. So, this morning I drag-ass out even earlier than I have to get up on my early weeks anyway and shnozzle out the driveway again.

It just sets me up for a bad mood for the day when I gotta tackle snow first thing in the morning. No sir, I don't like it.

BREAK

So, Zippy managed to meander in at the crack of 8:35, only thirty-five minutes late. Better than his standard hour plus. I needed an assist to get at a system at Funhouse2 over the network as I don't have the remote software on my system. He manages, within moments, to take a "can't get to the Funhouse mainframe" problem and turn it into "can't get on the network at all" right in front of me as I asked him to stop.

By the time BB got here, late because of his kid's school starting late, that system was completely hosed. BB was about ready to destroy Zippy. Turns out Destro and Zippy were already on BB's hit list for fucking up things yesterday. BB finally turned on quotas for the server. 12 GBs. Destro's best-bud the Paperboy was somewhere around 15 GBs. He was warned three days in advance to clean out some old stuff because the lock-down was coming. His response when asked why he didn't?

"I saw that email. I thought it applied to everybody but me. My stuff is important."

Yeah, because you need to keep a copy of every printed article about Funhouse you've collected over the last seven years in your profile. Archive the shit you only look at once every three years and offload it like any rational person would have done and have off with it. Nope. Destro was instantly convinced. "We gotta take care of Paperboy. He's important."

I could debate that point, but whatever. BB unchecked his quota box and let him have his way for now.

Then there's the brief but catastrophic T1 failure yesterday afternoon. Destro calls BB at home and asks him to fix it. Hey, brainiac, if you can't get out, he certainly can't get in.

So, anyway, Zippy and the Destro are already on the short list for BB and Zippy hits BB up the second BB gets here this morning with his fuck up of the system at Funhouse2. BB comes back to me and says, "what did Zippy do? He walked by me mumbling something about that system in Funhouse2 and saying that I could take care of it but he couldn't tell me what was wrong with it."

I explained what I knew. And BB blew his top. "I'm tired of picking up the pieces for his worthless ass. This is enough."

The staff meeting today ought to be entertaining as all get-out. So we've got that going for us.

Way more expense for little added benefit. Granted, I thought long and hard about it, but in the end couldn't justify it.

However, if this one causes major headaches while recording, I'll jump on a Firewire drive and swap this one into a permanent offline archive plugged in only when needing it. If I didn't plan on buying another drive in a few weeks, I probably would have went Firewire up front.

Never used one. Spent a lot of spare time during the last few years finding a good sound. Finally found that the washburn and digitech Scott Ian pedals are excellent. Also found that with patience, one can patch one of the digitech rp pedals to sound very nice.

I've seen people who believed if they spent a fortune on their rig it would always sound good no matter what. They inevitably sounded like shit. Then there's the guys who spent very little on their rigs but spent hour after hour fiddling with it. Usually, they sounded pretty good.

I would imagine with the amount of time I've spent tweaking the POD, I'm beginning to fall into the latter category. Lord knows the amp sims I'm using, if they were real, would cost me well over ten grand. All hail the modern guitar rig. It rocks, and it's shaped like a kidney bean.

I used to play through a Digitech Zoom system way back when. Always liked it pretty good for low-gain stuff, but in the late eighties/early nineties era, Digitech wasn't real good at high-gain. I'd imagine with Scott Ian on-board they probably changed that quite drastically.

can make some great sounds and is really easy to use. It is however noisy. The noise gates turning on and off is audible in recording situations whether a loud mic-ed amp or a DI connection. Really great for when not recording though. The washburn pedal with his name on it however, sounds nice no matter what and works well for mic-ing up an amp. I think it is discontinued. I found mine on ebay.

I spent about 5 years messing with different pedal chains and all in one jobs. Many nights of many hours spent tweaking. Spent a good chunk of change too. Tweaking pisses me off. I've found that the best thing for me was to just try everything I could get my hands on and move onto the next one if I didn't get a good sound right away. I think everyone does something like that. A period of exploration. Spend lots of time finding what you like, training your ears, getting familiar with various options, and then sticking with it when you find it.

Nothing annoys me more than the sound of the noise-gates popping open and closed on note heads and ends.

I'm a tweaker when it comes to settings simply because I've never been able to roll through equipment like some do. I had one full-stack and spent about a year getting it to sound right to me. Now, I've had the POD almost a year and am just now getting a sound that I'd call awesome out of it. However, now that I'm here, I don't think I'll ever get rid of it. Just too many options available. I don't always want to sound the same. And while I'm pretty sure I've found my main sound, there's still millions of options open to me if I'm having a blues day or a old-school rock day or something.

However, I'll also grant that I did have some equipment that there was just no way to get the sound I was going for out of. Those particular pieces did not last long. The Digitech floor processor comes to mind. The Zoom was a great practice tool. The floor processor didn't even get that right.

Finally got it the way I want it too. I've got one channel with noise reduction, compression, chorus, and delay. I use it for a clean and slightly spaced out sound. Very versatile. The other channel has only Scott Ian's Weapon of Mass Distortion. I've got a good solid one stomp switch to switch between channels, and a tuner on the end so either channel can tune silently. Also, when turned down the Weapon can be used as an overdrive, as opposed to "hold onto your balls and pray."

I didn't like the digitech RP for jaming because the pedals are small and close togther so you're stuck with one sound unless you have great aim and are good at gently switching with the tip of your shoe.

As far as that POD goes, never used one myself but have heard good sounds come out of them.

The POD is one of those things were it's so open what you do with it that it's easy to hit on something that well and truly sucks. And, like all effects boxes, all the default patches sound like complete crap. So lots of people get the opinion that they just sound like crap because they aren't smart enough to ship with good sounding patches installed.

I mean, really, who's going to run a modern amp sim like a Powerball into a 4x10 blues cab, pour seven layers of reverb on it and expect it to sound like "metal?" Apparently the boys at Line 6, that's who.

And don't even get me started on their "Puppetmaster" patch. As an old-sk00l Metallica fan, I can definitely say that isn't even close.

But, the good sounds are in there. Not at all easy to find, but there. But I've found that's true with a lot of equipment. I'm fussy when it comes to sound quality though, so I always tread that fine line between noisy SHHHHHHH sound and not enough gain.

is all about an extra stage of gain. All solid state. A quality overdrive in front of a dirty channel and pour on the bass. Not "scooping" out all the mids helps.

The fine line is a pain. Pay attention to volume. Lots of distortion tweaked at low volumes yields more noticable noise. Higher volume usually hides noise. I found that a really great sounding patch on my rp pedal sounds super noisy through headphones, but through an amp it sounds really nice.

Metallica rolled through a lot of different setups, but rhythms were mostly solid-state boosted tubes with the gain on the amp itself pulled back quite a bit and compensated for with the gain on the solid-state boost in front to tighten the bass up and allow you to keep lots of bass without getting floppy.

Justice era? Not only do you scoop out all the mids in the pre, but also in the post, and at mixdown, and every other place you can pull out the mids. And make sure the guitars stomp all over the bass itself.

Black album forward is a little more flat eq, but I don't play much of that stuff anyway.

As for the fine line, that's how I became a big fan of overdubbing rhythms. You can have three or four different patches each with somewhat lower gain settings to keep the noise down and the mix of them will sound very high gain without the noise. A single patch with really high gain is noise-centric.

I wish I could still play through a real amp, but I got tired of balancing neighbor's concerns with my own. My fullstack never left full volume though. Full volume, gain at about 10:30 and everything else set to eight or nine. Loud, but really smooth. If only I had the room to set up a sound-proof recording area, that would have been my sound. Ah well.

Theories which speak of James' insecurity in the face of losing Cliff and his hope to diminish the involvement of Jason to the point of making sure no one could hear him at all but this probably isn't the appropriate place for that discussion.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments and Stories are owned by the Poster and Licensed to "Hulver's site". See our Copyright page for more information.